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The Keep:The Language Hackers
Description For all language learners. Whether this is your 1st new language or your 5th, or you just need to know some phrases for an upcoming business trip, this is a place to challenge and encourage each other as we learn. Originally the #Add1Challenge guild, it is now broadened and renamed to include similar language learning hacks, like fluentin3months by Benny Lewis and All Japanese All the Time. Come share your favorite tips and tricks, your roadblocks, and get encouragement in all your language hacking endeavors. Resource List Here are some links that might be helpful in your language learning endeavours: Disclaimer: None of these sites are affilated with Habitica or the guild. They are being provided purely as suggestions. General Free *Duolingo has a number of online courses in various languages *Busuu has a number of online courses in various languages (basically similar to Duolingo, but with more langauges). Although generally useful I'd approach cautiously cause I've found few mistakes in intermediate Japanese sentences. *Cambridge University Open Courseware - German, Chinese, French, Italian, Russian resources and a handful of advices from professional academics. *lang-8 write something in your target language, have it corrected by a friendly native. Give back to the community by correcting other people's writing in your mother tongue. *italki write something in your target language, have it corrected by a friendly native. Give back to the community by correcting other people's writing in your mother tongue. *Bliu Bliu reading comprehension; some subscription elements *Memrise vocabulary retention using mnemonics *Quizlet a flash cards app (web+mobile), lots of searchable material. includes phonetic reading option for the cards. *Anki is flashcard (SRS) application. It's completely free and open source and can be used on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS, and through a web browser. The dev funds the project through the anki client on iOS (it's $24). The android app is developed by a different group of people and they release it for free. You can make your own decks or download shared decks. It's very customizable which comes at the cost of making it a bit obtuse. Definitely read the manual. *Mnemosyne A flash card app basically similar to Anki. At a time I've used both due to different flat hard sets available for each. *CueCard is a basic flashcard program available for download. Great for review when you don't have internet access. Got me through my exams :P *Forvo is a pronunciation database. If you need recordings of words by native speakers, search here. If the word doesn't already exist you can ask for it. In many cases there will be multiple recordings, marked by gender of the speaker and their location (e.g., a pronunciation of 'gato' in Spanish by a man from Chile, a woman from Spain, etc.) *HelloTalk is a language exchange app. There are people from all over who are available to chat and text. There are lots of nice features including, voice recording, free voice calls, video chat, sentence correction, text to speech, transliteration, translation etc. *ClozeMaster Learn your language in context, with an 8-bit multiple choice game. *DFLIFLC The Defense Language institute used by the U.S military for language training has some very valuable resources for free in select languages *LyricsTraining Improve your listening comprehension and practice with different accents interacting with the best musical videos, filling the gaps in the lyrics and using the Karaoke. *FutureLearn Currently Dutch, Spanish & Italian. *Linguti has gamification cources for a number of languages. *http://diccionario.reverso.net dictionary on-line with app if you prefere. It supports different languages and includes the words in different expressions. Paid *MosaLingua has apps for serveral languages that include learning tips. The apps are specific for the language chosen and work offline. They use a spaced repetition system where you can choose from around 3000 words and phrases or make your own. There are also extra packs that you can buy to include things like slang and local expressions. These apps a really good at teaching you phrases that can be put together into sentences and also has example dialogues to listen to with or without subtitles. *italki is a site you can use to practice conversation over the internet *innovative language an umbrella company with several websites, each dedicated to a separate language, altogether covering comprehensive language courses with plethora of resources to read, learn vocabulary, grammar, with videos, planned lessons and more. Covers about 30 languages. Check internet for possible discounts! There are some floating around most of the time. Highly recommended, I've been using their Italian and Japanese, especially the latter was oh so well worth the price with all the materials I was given access to. * Fluentu is a website that teaches a language by having you watch movies and other video content in that language. It offers subtitles and allows you to slow down the video if needed. It's currently available for English, Spanish, French, Chinese, German and Japanese. Useful Blogs *The Jack Sparrow Approach Some useful advice on speaking a language you aren't confident in. *Fluent Forever , a blog run by an opera singer and language learning enthusiast. Focuses on using neuroscience to create efficient methods of study (he uses Anki a lot). The author also has an associated book, posts youtube videos, and creates both free and paid study materials for a long list of languages. *The Polyglot Dream - a guy who speaks several languages shares his musings and advice on learning. *All Japanese All the Time nice resource for Japanese learners. *Talk to me in Korean is a great website about learning Korean. *Studentessa Matta - a blog about learning Italian. *The Mezzofanti Guild - a polyglot's place to be, gathering many resources and people together. Useful Extensions *Google translate for chrome Free and speedy IPA Free *Yorku.ca has a unique interactive IPA chart. *Fluent Forever has a series of videos on how the IPA works and how to use it to improve pronunciation when learning foreign languages. *Classzone.com is a website that follows language books by schools and has videos, flashcards, and a hometutor to help with broadening vocabulary and grammar concepts Paid *To go along with the video series, Fluent Forever has a pre-made Anki deck for learning the IPA. ($3) Language Specific Spanish Free *Spanishpod101 is a series of audio lesson podcasts (only the first 3 in each series are free, but there are many series) *RTVE is a site where you can find TV shows in Spanish *Mitele.es is another site for Spanish film and television *The Spanish Experiment lessons plus children's stories to introduce reading skills Useful Blogs *http://www.spanish-only.com/ is like AllJapaneseAllTheTime but for Spanish Chinese Free *Yellow Bridge - possibly the oldest and biggest Chinese related resources repository. *China.org.cn - a Chinese portal for learning Chinese. *Chinese4.eu - a Sino-European portal designed to help people learn Chinese for free. *Chinese Tools - also a very resourceful repository of all things Chinese. *Mandarin Tools - a rather resourceful website with many different gizmos to make learning faster and nicer. *Learn Chinese @ CRI English Portal - a rather big website which can serve as a bilingual reader. *Basic Chinese - a Cambridge University course. *Beginner's Chinese - an Open University course. *Intermediate Chinese - a Cambridge University course. *MJChinese - a very useful blog breaking down difficult grammar points and providing other resources. *Thinking Chinese - language resources by topic, hasn't been updated in a while, but the resoureces are still up. *China Smack - a bilingual reader with a pop-up dictionary. *Watch to Learn Chinese - a video repository. *Chinese Dictionary - goes by character elements, translates, provides pinyin, has a character quiz. There's an offline desktop version of this dictionary for Windows computers . *Chinese Subtitles for Chinese Films - a thread in the Chinese Forums where those are being gathered. *Decipher Chinese - for reading bite-size news in Chinese. The articles are classified according to HSK level. You have options to read either in traditional or simplified Chinese. It also comes with an android app. *PLECO - This is a good android dictionary app. It's features apart from the dictionary include flash cards and OCR screen reader. More complex features need to be paid. *Chinese Skill - Another android app which uses game-based techniques to teach Chinese. It aims to improve grammar, vocabulary, writing characters and pronunciation. Paid *Chinesepod.com a website similar to the above model, but specialising -only- in Chinese. It has an astonishing amount of dialogues with corresponding readers, questions and practice. There's a fairly useful forum there too, and their customer response is really decent. New content created each week. *Melnyks.com - a paid course in Chinese. Contains 270+ audio lessons with PDF transcripts. *Written Chinese - paid course, promises to be most helpful to visual learners. Looks interesting. Useful Blogs *Chinese Learning Blog *FluentU *Access Chinese Language *Hacking Chinese - a mighty useful blog with plenty of useful tips! *Chinese Hacks - blog & resources for learning Chinese. *MandarinHQ - a blog for Mandarin learners. YouTube Videos: ABCsofChinese Intro Videos *Part 1- Introduction to Chinese Characters *Part 2A- Traditional Chinese Teaching Methodology *Part 2B- ABCs of Chinese Teaching Methodology *Part 3- The Importance of Learning Chinese Japanese Free Sites *Denshi Jisho is a comprehensive online Japanese-English dictionary. It interlinks word entries with their kanji characters and radicals, displays example sentences, and tags for common words and JLPT levels. *JED app for Android is a solid Japanese-English dictionary app including kanji radical lookup, example sentences, and verb conjugations. It covers a wide range of words including esoteric technical phrases and coarse slang terms so proceed with caution in sensitive situations. *Delvin Language is a spaced repetition (SRS) vocabulary learning site that gives you XP for each word you get right. It plays a video containing the word with a subtitle with the word blanked out beneath it and prompts you to type the reading in kana (it will automatically convert romaji typed here) and then the meaning. If you answer correctly, you will gain XP, but if you answer wrongly, it will play the clip with the word visible in the subtitle. It allows you to progress through several sorted groups or through all the words in one large group. *The News Web Easy site is for NHK articles with furigana written above the kanji. It also gives the audio of each article and underlined words can be hovered over to read the dictionary definition in Japanese. There's a button which highlights people's names, places and company names in different colours. *Matcha has articles on places in Japan with furigana and occasionally English. *Erin's Challenge has subtitled (English/kana/romaji/Japanese with no aids) videos where the eponymous girl will teach about Japanese culture through skits, and lots of resources can be accessed without an account (free) - they include manga, vocabulary and quizzes. *Imabi has many lessons from beginning Japanese all the way through Classical Japanese, with detailed explanations (including the Japanese grammatical terminology), and examples. *Zkanji It's a free desktop software. It's primarily a Japanese-English dictionary. You can search for Kanji and the definitions include kana. It also allows you to search for stroke order and also has flash cards. It's a powerful tool for efficiently improving your Japanese and for free! Check the screenshots for more info. Free Extensions *Rikai-chan (for Firefox) and Rikai-kun (for Chrome) are browser plugins linking to the Denshi Jisho dictionary. With the plugin enabled you can mouseover Japanese text on a webpage and it will display a popup with the text's reading and definition. Paid Sites *Genki is a textbook produced by the Japan Times. *WaniKani is a spaced repetition (SRS) site for learning kanji that orders kanji (and vocabulary containing those kanji) in order of complexity. It features mnemonic stories to aid in recall. It costs $10 a month, or $100 a year, or $299 for a lifetime membership, but the first three levels can be accessed for free. *News in Slow Japanese is mostly premium content, but there are a few samples on the homepage that can be done for free, and they give not only the kanji, but also the romaji and furigana of the articles given. There are also popups that explain words you don't know. The lowest amount you'll have to shell out is $7.60 USD for a one month subscription, the highest is $28 USD for 6 months. Useful Blogs *KanjiDamage is a popular site dedicated to learning kanji. Their approach is entertaining and original, but expect coarse humor. They also create some of their own radicals and readings designed to make the learning process easier, just realize you won't necessarily find them on other sites. Also be aware that for some reason they put the imperial navy flag on some entries. *Gabriel Wyner (Fluent Forever) 's blog posts on Japanese are full of background and assistance (especially for kanji beginners), and include free downloads of his model Anki decks, which have a bunch of customizations to make flashcard creation faster and easier. He includes videos and detailed written descriptions on how to install and use the decks, plus the whole rundown on how and why he developed them to work the way they do. Korean Free * FunEasyLearn Korean Auslan Free *Signbank has a fantastic video dictionary as well as several other resources Norwegian Free *Norwegian the Tutorial is a good starting point for the absolute beginner. German Free *German-for-English-Speakers Great resources for learning german grammar if English is your native language. *DW Lots of learning resources for beginner to intermediate learners. *Radio TEDDY geared towards german children this resource can be helful for the intermediate learner Useful Blogs *Jakub Marian *Your Daily German Ancient Languages Free *The Perseus Project is a dictionary and form analyzer for Latin and Ancient Greek (also for Norse, but works not that well, and for Arabic but I haven't tested that), and database of classical literature Category:The Armory Category:Guilds